Spread.us is a new service that lets anyone share news and announcements using the Twitter accounts of colleagues, editors, friends or fans. It can be used by companies of any size, publishers, event organizers, social media experts, PR agencies or content curators who want to ‘spread’ their news with and via people who care enough to help share it.

Say what?

Picture the scene: You work in the PR department of a large company and you want an easy way to share company news with the world.

Sure, you could use the company blog, or maybe a press release service, but this is 2012 – we’re in the social era and everyone has the potential to have a voice if they want it. With Spread.us, your colleagues can help share your news by auto-magically retweeting and sharing any announcements made – with little or no effort.

Think about the potential reach a 1,000+ person company might have if it was able to share announcements over social media. This is exactly what Spread.us was built to do – spread news and announcements with a smidgen of support from those around you.

How it works

Here’s the three steps to setting up Spread.us.

Create a free account at Spread.us.

Setup your spread.us account. Part of the setup process is setting a maximum amount of tweets that will be posted to help prevent spam.

Invite colleagues and friends to subscribe to the curated spread.us list.

To share news on the accounts of all subscribers, you can create a campaign, click publish and Spread.us will post the tweet on multiple accounts for you, and subscribers will be notified by email when a tweet is posted. Spread.us also tracks the performance of each individual campaign in real time.

Spread.us adheres to a tiered pricing structure, starting off at ‘free’ for 0-5 subscribers, then $4 a month for 6-25 subscribers then incrementally more up to many thousands of users.

So…why the relaunch and what’s new with this incarnation of Spread.us? Well, first time ’round it was mainly targeted at blogs to help spread their posts using either a WordPress plugin or RSS feed. Initially, it was a little like Twitterfeed.

“We figured there will be a lot of other companies that face the same issue, people are emailing around to ask everyone to retweet or tweet something,” says Dennis van der Vliet, co-creator of Spread.us. “The technology behind Spread.us could be easily used to do just that, spread tweets for a group of people.”

And so the move was made away from publishing content automatically from an RSS feed or plugin to emphasize existing relations between people. “The tweets we now make on behalf of users are created manually, just like a normal tweet,” adds Dennis. “The relation between the person asking to tweet something and the person tweeting plays a bigger role.”

The service could be used for just about anything you can think of – breaking news for publishers, press releases, curated tweets, you name it. “Spread.us works best when it is used by a group of people that already have a trusted connection,” adds Dennis. “This is not the holy grail to spam everybody at the same time, but a way to share most important messages on multiple accounts from trusted contacts to widen the reach of the message in a very easy way.”